With the Oscars coming up this weekend, I'll be putting up the Man on Film entries (both old and new) for this year's big nominees. Here goes.
If there is one thing that Alfonso Cuarón is inarguably capable of doing, it is making a film that must be seen on the big screen. In the case of Gravity, that means IMAX and 3D because no one maximizes the medium of film like Cuarón does. Unlike any film that's come before it, Gravity manages to use the scope and technology at today's filmmaker's disposal to its fullest potential. While I would still posit--even after having seen Gravity--that 3D simply doesn't add enough to the experience, Gravity is definitely worth the price of admission if only for the spectacle of the IMAX presentation.
Yes, Gravity is worth every penny paid to see it. The film is an event that warrants seeing it on the big screen. Unfortunately, the simplicity of the narrative finds a way to wither in the majesty of the presentation. That isn't to say that the film isn't emotionally affective. It is. Over the course of the movie, it is nearly impossible not to feel for Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) as they are left adrift in space without contact to the outside world. Cuarón masterfully builds the characters and the suspense to keep you engaged. Both of the film's stars are everything you would want them to be.
It is just strange that the film's story is so intimate when cast against the magnitude of the film itself. It's a brilliantly conceived vision; it's just that the contrast in scopes of narrative and mise-en-scène is so drastic as to almost be distracting. Obviously, this was Cuarón's intent, and really, who am I to question a man as brilliant as he? It just seems that this film was all about the spectacle, emotional as it may have been, while failing to stay with you once you left the theater.
While the prospect of sitting through a film in which a family tries to pick up the pieces of their lives as one of their own sits at death's door can often be a daunting one, especially if you've experienced such loss in your own life, Alexander Payne's latest feature The Descendants adeptly skirts around the tedium, melodrama, and depression into which most grief-driven fare often tumbles.
At this point, Payne's curriculum vitae should speak for itself. In his last three features--Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways*--Payne and long-time writing partner Jim Taylor** combined to made films that while often dealing with protagonists who should have been little more than sad-sacks ended up carving out a niche that saw them crafting much less depressive films than the subject (and protagonist) would otherwise have been if in the hands of others.
*I always forget about Citizen Ruth, in large part because I've never seen it. Oddly, I always thought it was a movie made for HBO. This was not the case, as it was a Miramax release.
**I just found out that Payne and Taylor were two of the three credited screenwriters for Jurassic Park III. What. The. Fuck?
This time around Taylor isn't in the writing mix, just wearing the hat of a producer. In his stead, Payne enlisted the help of Nat Faxon (recognizable to most readers as Garlan Greenbush from Party Down episode "Party Down Company Picnic") and Jim Rash (Dean Pelton from Community). Working from the Kaui Hart Hemmings debut novel by the same name, Payne & Co. have given the movie-going public a movie that doesn't simply deal with death in the typical way of blindly honoring the dead.
As Matt King (George Clooney) learns shortly after his wife's accident, his wife had been cheating. The marriage wasn't exactly on the best of terms, but the typical course in the woman being kept alive by machines is deified is not the one that is run here. In the wake of his wife's boating accident that has rendered her a vegetable, Matt must connect with his daughters, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley of The Secret Life of the American Teenager) and Scottie (Amara Miller). All the while, he must come to his own terms with his strained marital relationship without being able to talk to his spouse. In attempting to reconcile the bombshell that her infidelity was, he tries to balance his duties as sole trustee (in a trust set to expire of his large family's 25,000 acres of virgin land on Kauai with trying to work through the grieving process while trying to step up from his previous role as "back-up parent." He accomplishes the latter by bringing his daughters--and Alexandra's quasi-beau Sid (Nick Krause)--along with him, working through their grief together.
Delving into the plot any further is largely pointless in talking abut the film. It is not the plot of The Descendants that sets it apart. Rather it is the rawness and breadth of emotions covered therein. As Matt works through the anger, pain, confusion, and sorrow, his journey is one that is quietly but intensely affective. The gamut of emotions that Matt runs are easily relatable. The audience can place themselves in his shoes with little thought or energy spent. The verity of his emotional sojourn is naturally evident; quite simply, The Descendants attains a level of truth that most films do not.
What matters the most here is that The Descendants feels genuine. There are lighter moments and clear laughs (much of what happens with Sid), but these aspects of the film are simply complimentary. The backbone of the film is the natural handling of grief with which Payne and Co. have imbued it. At the film's pre-coda close, this obedience to truth pays dividends and the audience is left touched.
George Clooney's fourth time out as a director sees him stepping back into a more serious realm after his middling football romp Leatherheads. While not reaching the heights that he soared to in Good Night and Good Luck--the best film of 2005--it is hard to fault him for not making a masterpiece this time around.
What The Ides of March is about at its core is Junior Campaign Manager Stephen Myers's loss of innocence. The brains behind the campaign, Stephen (played by the ever-impressive Ryan Gosling) embodies the idealistic crusader that so many wide-eyed and hopeful young people getting into politics are. In Governor Mike Morris (Clooney), Stephen believes that he has found his man, the one that can make a difference. Morris is the filmic equivalent of Jed Bartlett or Matt Santos, a paragon of liberal virtues and ideals in the form of an attractive and charismatic man. In other words, Morris is a dream candidate.
Unfortunately, Morris is a human being and is therefore imperfect. As Morris's imperfection becomes an issue, Myers begins to chip away at his own innocence. With both Senior Campaign Managers--of Morris's campaign, Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and that of his Democratic Primary rival, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti)*--serving as cautionary examples of what cynicism-riddled existences a life on the campaign trail can produce, the future that awaits Stephen is prominently featured throughout the film. His path is sealed by the course of action he takes at each crossroads. As he gets deeper and deeper, he loses more and more of himself.
*The Ides of March is unique in that is likely the only movie that will ever be made requiring the acting talents of both Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It must have been odd for the two of them to not be competing for the same role, as there are actually two homely, unscrupulous, manipulative pricks who want to win at all costs in this film.
Stephen's devolution is representative of the inevitable death of idealism in politics as winning takes precedence over maintaining the moral high ground. Governor Morris, too, is required to sacrifice his principles for the prospect of winning. To say that this film holds little hope for the ability of idealists to traverse the treacherous and rocky terrain without losing touch with what they believed in prior to entering into the fray is an understatement.
On these points, the film works. If you were looking for any sort of political intrigue or an unpredictable plot, this isn't your movie. While the central concern of the film is what happens to Stephen Myers, the course that the campaign takes through the Ohio Primary is obvious from the moment Evan Rachel Wood walks across the screen. The campaign is secondary to Stephen's descent, but it still fails to surprise from a narrative standpoint. While one could hardly qualify the campaign as dead screen time, it definitely seems to do little but serve a purpose to forward a single character's story arc.
The film does look great, set against the bleak landscape of the Rust Belt in March, and is carried by great performances from Gosling and Clooney with Hoffman, Giamatti, and Wood holding their own. Clooney, who also co-wrote the screenplay, clearly has an aptitude for crafting a film imbued with strong liberal ideals, as all of Morris's speeches on the campaign trail would have been right at home in the Sorkin-helmed seasons of The West Wing. For the most part, he's got another great film on his hands, although its not flawless like Good Night and Good Luck was.
First things first: it seems as though the expectations as to what the film is going to be when one head's into the theater have been led hopelessly astray, due largely to the ad campaign for the film. If one sees the trailer for The American with no other knowledge about the film, they may think that it is going to be a movie in which the hunter become the hunted and that it will be a mile-a-minute thrill ride.
If one knows that this film is by the director of the Ian Curtis biopic, Control, and this video:
then those expectations should be entirely different.
What we get in the end is a nuanced piece that follows an assassin while he is laying low in Italy. We get a glimpse into the day-to-day life of a killer-for-hire trying not to make a ripple after getting personally involved with someone in Sweden only to have the relationship end tragically. It is a simple film that relishes silence, stillness, and the quiet Italian countryside. The dialogue is sparse, the action sparser, and, honestly, the film is refreshing for it.
Anton Corbijn clearly has an eye for the deliberate "thinking man's action film." He builds the suspense by letting the audience's imagination run wild. The lack of action and the gradual building of tension by keeping the camera with the protagonist and experiencing the events that transpire alongside him are what truly make the film work. Taking a page from the book of Hitchcock, he lets the images do the talking. This film could exist without dialogue, and it would still be entirely comprehensible and, more importantly, compelling.
One of the main reasons for this is its star, George Clooney. Clooney commands the screen effortlessly. To his credit, he bathes in the lulls and lets each line breathe, sitting back and letting the silence do its thing.
The American also has some pretty significant nudity, which is great as long as you are not watching the film with your parents. Both Irina Bjorklund and Violante Placido are very pleasing to the eye, and Corbijn's lens is ever-so-kind to both of them.
The nudity is simply a bonus, though, as the movie more than stands on its own merits without it. As long as you go in not expecting the film that it was marketed as, you should be happy.
Since The Royal Tenenbaums, it has kind of felt like Wes Anderson was treading water. In each film, he seems to have been desperately seeking his father's approval, and each has ultimately drowned in paternal pathos. Even the shine of Anderson's perpetual quirkiness has begun to lose its luster, as his characters have become increasingly unlikeable and decreasingly tethered to a reality anyone in the audience can share.
As the real world has become a less than integral element in Anderson's ouvre, the leap to The Fantastic Mr. Fox makes sense.
Now if one were to assume that since The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a movie for children that there wouldn't be any daddy issues, one would be mistaken. For nearly the entire film, the Jason Schwartzman-voiced Ash begs for his father's attention/approval.
Luckily, since there is a clear break from reality and stop-motion animation is a new medium for Anderson to work within, this doesn't feel as tired as The Darjeeling Limited and (especially) The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou did.
For the most part, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a fun ride. The kiddie flick 'cuss' alternative is amusing for the adult. The farm-robbing hijinx breathe enough life into the film not to bore. Visually speaking, the stop-motion animation that he first experimented with in The Life Aquatic gets to breathe a full breath, stretch its legs out, and make itself comfortable. Given the time of a feature-length film and the hand of a director who doesn't seem to have a whimsy off-switch, the full breadth of what the stop-motion can do is realized to great effect. That combined with the boisterous agri-capers that the George Clooney-voiced Mr. Fox ventures out on, make for a fun, family-friendly romp.
The one thing I do wonder is whether or not children are going to get this film. I mean, I'm not a kid so personally I don't give a damn whether it works for children, but I doubt that most six-year-olds are going to be drawn into a film in which the character that they would most closely associate themselves with is conniving and whining for a good chunk of the film.
Again, that does not color my view on the film, and I liked it walking out to the car, so I guess that's all that really matters.
Now if only Wes Anderson's father would express some pride in his son's work, so we could all get to see what might happen if he made a film with a different thematic template...
"In Rainbows" - I'm not even remotely impartial, but the new Radiohead record is really fucking great. I can't say I was expecting what I got. It seems a little less resigned to minor keys, and they seem to have gotten back to guitar-driven music, which I think they're fucking great at. I've said nothing new to anyone, though, and there has been an over-abundance of Radiohead reviews/reactions, so I'll let this rest.
Gone Baby Gone - Unlike Marjorie Baumgarten at the always reliable Austin Chronicle, I was enthralled by Casey Affleck's turn as Patrick Kenzie. "Nebbishy quality and mumbly speaking voice" aside he really owns this role. More importantly, I was much more than pleased with Ben's direction and adapted screenplay. He establishes the city as a character exceptionally well and lets his actors chew on insanely engrossing monologues and diatribes. Ed Harris outside of the hospital blows a hole a mile wide right through your gut. It's much better than the other Lehane adaptation, Mystic River and, conspiring with his work on The Wire, makes me want to actually check out his work, which Mystic River most definitely did not accomplish.
The Darjeeling Limited - It was a welcome return to a world in which I could imagine myself living in, unlike my least favorite Wes Anderson film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I loved that each of the brothers were more or less complete assholes and was shocked by the Schwartzmann finger-lick, which is very much akin to the moment in the classroom in Rushmore where Miss Cross gives her "not if you've ever fucked before" speech to Max. It's certainly not Anderson's best film, which I still believe is Rushmore, but it was certainly good.
"The Shepherd's Dog" - Fucking amazing. There is not a single misstep in Sam Beam's musical evolution as far as I'm concerned.
"Yellow Dog" - The new Greg Brown live record is pretty damn good. It's full of songs that he pulled straight from a notebook. He'd not performed them or recorded them previously. Aside from "Oily Boys" being perhaps a little heavy handed (and with a political song the heavy handedness tends to go over like a lead balloon with me), the songs are great. It's also for a good cause with much (if not all) of the proceeds going to help the Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Michael Clayton - While it certainly looked good, this film is simply a retread of every fucking ethical dilemma lawyer movie we've all seen 15 times before. The actors are all great, but I'm sure no one expects Clooney, Wilkinson, et al., to be anything other than that. Quite frankly, I'm not sure what anyone could have seen in this to make them think this was anything less than run-of-the-mill. Again the acting is great, but I kept waiting for the film to surprise me, and it didn't.
And there will be one more rave to come, not that anyone cares.
